



ADDRESSES 



INAUGURATION 



James C. Welling, LL. D., 



President of the"^ Columbian College, 



WASHINGTON, D. C, 



Monday Evenings November 6, 187 



WASHINGTON : 

Gibson Brothers, Printers. 

1871. 



ADDRESSES 



INAUGURATION 



James C. Welling, LL. D., 



A..- 



President of the Columbian College, 



WASHINGTON, D. C, 



Monday Evenings November ^^ 1871. 







WASHINGTON : 

Gibson Brothers, Printers. 

1871. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



The public inauguration of James C. Welling, LL. D., 
as President of the Columbian College, took place on the 
evening of November 6, 1871, in the Congregational 
Church, corner of Tenth and G streets, Washington, D. C. 

The exercises were opened with prayer by the Rev. 
James H. Cuthbert, D.D., after which the Rev. George 
W. Samson, D.D., delivered a Farewell Address, as the 
retiring President of the College. 

An Ode, written for the occasion by the Rev. Stephen 
P. Hill, D.D., was then sung, upon which the Hon. 
John A. Bolles, LL. D., Vice-President of the Board of 
Trustees of the College, delivered to the newly-elected 
President the keys, symbolical of his ofhce, and accompa- 
nied their presentation with an Address, at the close of 
which he formally introduced Dr. Welling, who thereupon 
proceeded to deliver his Inaugural Discourse. 

The exercises were closed with a Doxology, suno- by 
the audience, and with a Benediction pronounced by the 
Rev. Cleland K. Nelson, D.D., Vice-President of St. 
John's College, at Annapolis, Md. 

The following pages contain the Presentation Address 
of Mr. Bolles and the Inaugural Discourse of President 
Welling, as published by request of the Executive Com- 
mittee of the Board of Trustees. 



■FL E is/o: -A. li k: s 



HoK. John A. Bolles, LL. D 



Mr. Welling: 

The Board of Trustees of the Columbian College had, 
until this morning, hoped that their respected and beloved 
President, Wm. W. Corcoran, Esq., '^darum et venerabile 
nomen," a gentleman identified for a long series of years 
with every enterprise intended to promote the welfare and 
prosperity of this District, would have been able, not only 
to be present on this occasion, but also to take an active part 
in these Inaugural Ceremonies ; to place in your hands the 
keys of the College as symbols of your official powers and 
duties, and to address you, for a few minutes at least, upon 
the topics suggested by that presentation. 

Mr. Corcoran, however, does not feel well enough even to 
read the one short sentence which he had written, and at his 
request I take his place, and, yielding to his urgency, I 
shall, as the Vice-President of the Board of Trustees, first 
read to you his own carefully chosen words, and then add 
thereto a few observations of my own, which seem to be 
called for by this interesting occasion. 

He intended to say : 

"President WelUng, it affords me great pleasure to place in your 
hands the kejs of the Columbian College, and to express my belief 
that your execution of the important trust confided to you will be char- 
acterized by ability and zeal " 

Sir, the ''belief" of Mr. Corcoran is also the belief of 



the Board of Trustees, who have unanimously elected you 
President of the College. That belief and that choice were 
founded upon a long and fauiiliar acquaintance with your 
intellectual power, your moral worth, your ample learning, 
and your administrative and executive ability. This knowl- 
edge guided our action and choice when, upon the resigna- 
tion of your predecessor, it became onr duty to select and 
appoint a new President for that seat of learning, the man- 
agement of whose general interests is confided to us, but 
whose success depends far more directly, and far more 
largely, upon its President than upon the Trustees them- 
selves. We felt, very deeply, the responsibility devolved 
upon us by the retirement of the Rev. Dr. Samson ; and 
we felt also, as our thoughts nnd eyes turned toward you, 
that you were the man to fill, with honorable success, the 
position thus vacated. 

We now feel that our choice was wise, and that your 
acceptance of the offered Presidency justifies us, and the 
public in whose midst you have so long dwelt, in expecting 
for the College a brilliant and successful future. We feel 
sure that our convictions and our hopes are echoed in the 
hearts, (as they seem to shine in the faces)^ of this assembly, 
composed, as we believe it to be, of gentlemen and ladies 
who are the delegates and representatives of a public far 
too large to find seats in this spacious audience-room. 

With such convictions and confidence, with such faith 
and hope, we give you these symbolic keys. They are six 
in number. The first is the key of the President's house. 
Take it, sir, feeling that your house is your castle, and that 
we shall not presume to interfere with your domestic rights 
and duties. They are your exclusive domain, and will, I 
doubt not, be worthily exercised and enjoyed. May you 
long and happily find a home in that dwelling, surrounded 



by those whom you love and by whom you are beloved. 
The second of these keys opens to you the door, the control, 
the prosperity of our Preparatory School, the nursery of 
our College, within whose walls are to be trained and disci- 
plined the younger pupils confided to your oversight. 
Then comes the key of the College proper^ wherein our 
ingenuous youth are to be prepared for admission to stu lies 
and scliools more strictly professional — which schools and 
studies are opened to your authority and care by these three 
other keys — the keys to our Departments of Law, Medicine 
and Theology. Keceive these all, sir, as tokens of our con- 
fidence in you, as emblems of your authority, and as sym- 
bols of your duty. With them open and occupy all those 
Departments of our beloved College , and while with them 
you thus take possession of these abodes of learning, may 
you, in the exercise of the powers which they represent, 
open the hearts, and possess the minds, and form the life- 
long habits, of more than one generation of loving and 
deserving disciples. 

We give you now tliese six keys alone. But ere long we 
expect to increase their number so as to represent every 
department of learning needful to the formation of a Uni- 
versity as broad in its endowments, in its plans of instruc- 
tion and its field of duty, as the wants of the great people 
in whose centre and Capital it will be placed. We hope — 
we purpose — so to enlarge this College that within its walls 
shall be studied all arts, all sciences, all literatures, all pro- 
fessions, occupations, and callings which the ambitious youth 
of our glorious Union may desire to study or pursue ; that 
here, in an institution worthy of the great Capital of a great 
nation, may be taught and learned whatever develops and 
adorns the mind and soul of man. 

Such is the determination of the Trustees, who have 



8 

chosen you to administer this College of the present, this 
University of the future. We know that you fully sympa- 
thize and concur in this plan and purpose, and that you 
believe with us that such a future is a not distant possibility. 
So thinks our venerable and beloved head ! Nor will you or 
I, or any of us, forget the pleasant, prophetic light which 
beamed from his eyes on a recent occasion, when, after con- 
ference with us upon this glowing theme, he exclaimed : 
"Gentlemen, it depends upon us whether this great s-cheme 
be carried into full execution l" 

Ladies and Gentlemen, I now have the pleasure of 
introducing to you James C Welling, LL. D., President 
of the Columbian CoUegCj who will deliver his inaugural 
address. 



INAUGURAL DISCOURSE 

OP 

PRESIDENT WELLING, 



THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION, 

The subject of Education offers a theme for discussioD afc 
once the most easy and most difficult ; the most easy if we 
content ourselves with the rehearsal of common places on 
the topic, such a& are universally received among men ; 
and the most difficult if we undertake to propound a theory 
of education which shall be in all respects true without 
being trite, or novel without being in some respects un- 
sound. Education is a subject on which men have been 
thinking and writing from the very dawn of intellectual 
activity in the race, and yet it is a subject on wliicli men 
widely differ, even at the present day, in regard to both the 
processes and the objects of that higher training which looks 
to the best attainable good of the human mind. This 
diversity of credence and practice springs, in a great de- 
gree, from the fact that all Education is partly an Art and 
partly a Science ; so much an art that it must ever depend 
on the varying skill of different teachers, and on the varying 
aptitudes of different learners, but, at the same time, so much 
a science that all forms of education, having regard to any 
specific end, cannot be equally good, and, among the various 
competing theories of mental culture, there must be one 
which, on a consideration of all the elements involved in 
the problem, we can adjudge to be the best that the wit of 
man has thus far been able to devise. For, however the 



10 

elements of the i^rohlem may differ, according to the capa- 
bilities of the teacher, the capacity of the scholar, the ends 
which the scholar proposes to himself, and the general 
wants of society in any given age, there must still be a 
scheme of education which, '' smoothed, and squared, and 
fitted to its place," shall be more wise and more expedient 
than any other — a scheme in which the applied art of edu- 
cation shall be based on such scientific foundations as the 
nature of the case may admit. 

Accepting the theme thus suggested to me by the proprie- 
ties and formalities of this occasion, I have, in the first 
place, to inquire what is the object which we should set 
before us in determining the elements of higher academic 
learning. For with the lower stages of juvenile culture we 
are not directly concerned to-night, and, as to them, there 
is not so much room for difference among educators. Ac- 
cording to the terms of the problem proposed by higher 
education, we are called, as I conceive, not to discuss the 
special adaptation of specific educational studies designed to 
meet the requirements of any particular vocation in indus- 
trial or professional life, bat to investigate the fundamental 
elements of that more liberal and generous culture which 
looks to the symmetrical development of the whole man in 
all his powers and capacities. And as this is the object of 
higher academic education, it necessarily follows that any 
system of such education must be defective if it omits from 
its purview any one of those essential studies by which the 
human race has been advanced to its present civil, social, 
intellectual, moral, and religious status. As in ancient 
Egypt men were able, it is said, by the graduated scales of 
the Nilometer, not only to measure the depth of the fertiliz- 
ing waters that covered the land lut also to predict the 
extent of the coming harvest, so from the standard of educa- 



11 

tlon in any age we may not only gauge the degree in which 
it rises to the wants of the present time, but may also fore- 
cast the destiny it prefigures to the coming generation. In- 
stitutions of higher learning are founded among men to 
perpetuate and to transmit the existing stock of knowledge 
in all those departments which conduce to the intellectual 
progress of our race. Failing in this end, whether from a 
defect in the methods or means of education, they visibly fall 
below the standard erected for tliem in the requirements of 
the living age. But they do not subserve all the ends of 
their creation by achieving tbis purpose alone. It is not 
enough for educators, in the higher walks of their art, to 
preserve and propagate the elements of didactic knowledge, 
but they are bound so to impart these elements in all their 
fulness and vitalizing power, as to create the conditions of 
a gi'owing advancement in learning and civilization. To 
accomplish these great objects the teacher must have equal 
regard to the number and quality of the subjects taught, 
and to the method, and order, and spirit of his instructions. 
^'Teachers," says Bacon, ^'are not ordained for transitory 
uses, but for the progression of the sciences- — ad sufficiendam 
soholem scientice in sceciUa " No university, it is true, even 
in all its Faculties, can teach, as Sir William Hamilton has 
said, the om7ie scibile, but a university can comprise in its 
curriculum such ''a compend of the past thought and cul- 
tivation of the race" as shall be reduced to the shape and 
dimension best fitted to be taken in by the minds of the pres- 
ent generation^ and therefore best fitted to promote the 
growth of culture. 

It was from a disregard of this latter educational require- 
ment that the progress of mental culture was arrested in 
Greece so soon as the pedagogues, who succeeded the age of 
original inquiry, contented themselves simply with the exist- 



^ 



■ 12 

ing state of knowledge, instead of so learning it themselves, 
and so teaching it to their pupils as to propagate, with 
knowledge, the love of it, and thus to stimulate and direct 
that spirit of inquiry which leads to never-ending conquests 
in the world of Thought and of Nature. And so, too, during 
the Middle Ages, knowledge came to a stand-still in Europe, 
not from any torpor of the mental faculties among the 
School-men, for never were men more laborious and more 
acute than they ; but because their mental activity revolved 
in the verbal philosophy of Aristotle as if in a treadmill^ 
and was not suffered to go beyond the tether of that profes- 
sorial and didactic discipline which bound it to the Past, as 
if the Past had contained in itself the be-all and the end-all 
of human philosophy. They failed to see in the successive 
stages of human history the stepping-stones of an ever- 
advancing progress. Under such a theory science degener- 
ates^ into a meie logomachy, and literature dwindled into a 
dry and formal rhetoric. Education was still conducted in 
the Trivium and Quadrivium of the Cathedral and Cloistral 
schools with a vast expenditure of logical apparatus brought 
to bear on topics which lacked the quality of real truth, and 
which, from defects both of substance and form, failed to 
afford either the basis or the instruments of a higher intel- 
lectual proficiency. The world was then not indeed with- 
out its Doctors, ^'divine" and "transcendental" and 
'•'irrefragable ;" but from Peter Lombard, its famous Magis- 
ier Senteritiarum Sapientwm, to John of Occam, its redoubt- 
able Doctor invincibilis, singulavis et venerabilis, it luas wich- 
out teachers who riglitly apprehended either the elements 
or the methods of that true intellectual culture which teaches 
men not only ivliat to know but also liow to learn. It is only 
in so far as the Occidental Nations have made learning 



13 

reproductive and progressive that ^' fifty years of Europe" 
are^ as Tennyson tells us, better than " a cycle of Cathay." 
Bat even when it is said that higher academic education 
must at least aim to transmit the existing sum of knowledge 
unimpaired, we have, by necessary implication, defined, in 
a measure^ the methods and means of university culture, 
for it is obvious that the essential factors of that knowl- 
edge which constitutes the mental wealth of the present age 
must enter into the constitution of any scheme of studies 
designed to impart the higher education in its complete- 
ness. The education of the individual, as that of the race, 
may be said, indeed, to depend, in the most comprehensive 
sense of the word, on all those complex influences of the 
past and present which have combined to determine the 
resultant intellectual state of humanity. The Present is 
what the Past has made it, and bears in its bosom the germs 
of the Future. But, confining our view, as we do on this 
occasion, to a general survey of the fundamental elements 
which enter into the present constitution of human knowl- 
edge, we may say^ with Bacon, that out of the five-and- 
twenty centuries over wliich the memory and learning of 
men extend, we can hardly pick out six that were fertile in 
sciences or favorable to their development. Speaking from 
the point of view reached in his day, he adds : 

"Only three revolutions and periods of learning can be 'properly 
reckoned — one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, 
and the last among us; that is to say, the nations of Western Europe." 

In a still wider survey of human progress on the line of 
man's intellectual education, it may be said that three great 
civilizing nations have mainly determined the quality and 
the range of those studies which lay the basis of modern 
intellectual life and culture. We derive from the Hebrews 



14 

the rudiments of that knowledge which ascertains the rela- 
tions of man to God, and which lays in Divine Theology 
the foundations of both theoretical and practical ethics. 
Of this education, the Family and the Christian Church are 
at once the peculiar guardians and the most efficient agents. 
But no scheme of university education can, even on intel- 
lectual grounds, ignore the Wisdom that cometh from 
above, and which is profitable to direct in all things. The 
college which does not write Jehovah-Nissi on its banners 
has already w^ritten Ichabod on its door-posts. 

And as the elements of our religious culture have been 
mainly transmitted to us by the chosen people of Gol, 
so the elements of our intellectual and political education 
have been primarily derived from the Greeks and Eoraans. 
It is the Greeks and the Romans who have been the federal 
representatives of humanity in all that pertains to the origi- 
nal institutes of secular learning, literature, art, and polity 
' — -the great elements which have mainly combined to make 
our intellectual condition what it is to-day. 

Now, if it be true that a liberal education " consists in 
sharing in the best influences of the progressive intellectual 
refinement of man ;" if the present age is not independent 
of the ages that have preceded it ; but if the days of the 
race, as of the individual, are bound each to each by a sort 
of natural piety, it needs no elaborate argument to vindi- 
cate the place which the Grecian and the Roman languages 
and literatures must hold in any course of studies designed 
to furnish the basis of an integral education of the intellect. 

When Dr. ilrnold, the honored Master of Rugby Scliool, 
in England, first caught a view of Rome, as he drew near 
to that ^'City of the soul," on the occasion of his visit to 
Italy, in the year 1840, he exclaimed: " Of earthly sights, 
this is the third — Athens and Jerusalem are the other 



15 

two — the three peoples of God's election, two for things 
temporal and one for things eternal." As the thunders of 
Sinai still peal through the innermost recesses of man's 
spiritual nature, so from the Acropolis of Athens we still 
catch, as it echoes down the "corridors of Time," the 
reverberation of that resistless eloquence which once '^fui- 
mined over Greece," while in Eoman polity and in Roman 
literature we still find the traditions of a civilization which 
has become part and parcel of modern times. 

But it is argued by some that for this very reason, be- 
cause the modern civilization has absoi'bed the best elements 
of Greek and Roman life, we may omit the cultivation of 
Greek and Roman letters in order to devote the more atten- 
tion to the modern literatures of Italy, or France, or Spain, 
or Germany, with which we stand in more direct and imme- 
diate relations. 

In reply to this allegation, I have only to say that when 
I am referred to the case of any scholar who, after mastering 
the tongues, and familiarizing himself with the literatures 
of modern Europe, for purposes of mental culture, has been 
content to turn away from the great original fountains of 
culture in Greece and Rome, it will be time enough to 
reconsider my estimate of the place and value traditionally 
assigned to the ancient classics. Shall we put the study of 
the German in the place of the Greek? But we find Schil- 
ler, as he says, delightedly walking under the intellectual 
sky of Greece, that he might learn how to purify the strains 
of his German muse. Shall we put the Italian in the place 
of the Roman tongue? But we find Dante in his great 
poem referring to Aristotle as il maestro di color che sanno, 
and turning a reverential eye to Virgil as to the source from 
which he derived the beautiful style that has done him 
honor and immortalized the Divina Commedia. 



16 

Some years ago. when the subject of education was under 
iliscussion in the French Chamber of Deputies, M. Arago, 
then a member of that body, is represented to have held the 
following language : 

" I ask for classical studies. I require them. I deem them indis- 
pensable. But I do not think that they must necessarily be in Greek 
and Latin. I wish that in certain schools these studies should be 
superseded, at the pleasure of the municipal authorities, by a thorough 
study of our own tongue. I wish that in every college it might be 
permitted to put in the place of Greek and Latin the study of some 
living tongue. I require even that the language thus substituted may 
be different according to the situation of the place — that at Perpiguan 
and at Bayonno, for instance, it may be Spanish, *at Havre the Eoglish, 
at Besan(;jon the G^rsv^an." 

I entirely concur in this view of the French physical phi- 
losopher wherever the object of education is partial and not 
integral — aiming at professional or artisan dexteiity as a 
means of livelihood, rather than to perfect the whole man 
by the full, harmonious, and thorough development of his 
capacities. If it be the missio?i of the French college, in 
the idea of Arago, to equip the stores of Perpignan and 
Bayonne, of Havre and Besancon, with fluent corresponding 
clerks and despatchful CGimmissionaires , it cannot be doubted 
that he has suggested the most expeditious means of reach- 
ing that object. But it has been commonly supposed that 
University education aims at something higher than this. 
It proposes to develop the whole man that he may, in the 
truest sense of the term, be an end to himself, and not to 
the end that he may excel in any single manipulation of 
handicraft life. This minor and special education has, 
indeed, its uses, and for the great mass of mankind it is 
the only form of education which can be adjusted either to 
their condition or the wants of society ; but it is not the 



17 

education wliicli will keep the great channels of thought and 
culture open to the influx of that mighty current which has 
thus far borne our race to higher and still higher levels in 
the world of science and in civilization. They who would 
take the tide of modern civilization at its flood in Germany 
or France, but who, at the same time, would dam up the 
stream of knowledge as it has descended to us from Greece 
and Eome, propose to themselves a problem no more sensi- 
ble than that of the engineer who should think to improve 
the navigation of the Mississippi river below New Orleans 
by cutting ofi* its affluents, the Ohio and the Missouri. 

While I thus advocate the right of the ancient classical 
tongues to retain their hereditary place in intellectual edu- 
cation ; and while I assert for them^ considered as instru- 
ments of education, an advantage over the study of modern 
languages, I would not have it supposed that I am indifierent 
to the just claims of the latter, and especially would I guard 
against the presumption that I am indifi'erent to the scholarly 
culture of our own noble language, and of that peerless 
literature which we inherit as a birth-right. I advocate the 
study of the ancient classics because I believe them indis- 
pensable to the thorough study and scholarly appreciation 
of any modern language, or of any modern literature, not 
excepting our own. 

If, then, on historical and logical grounds, as well as 
from considerations of scholastic discipline and utility, we 
must claim for classical learning a necessary place in any 
scheme of university education, it is equally easy to estab- 
lish the right of the higher mathematics to be included in 
any such scheme. Mathematical studies were an integral 
element, if not, as some maintain, the starting-point of 
that intellectual reformation which dates from the time of 
Plato. And men have curiously speculated what the Greek 



18 

civilization might have become if tliC G-reek education had 
continued to be essentially mathematical, as it was in the 
days of Plato. It was not until this education had declined 
that the ancient astronomy became entangled in a cumbrous 
apparatus of fixed and crystalline spheres^ 

" With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, 
Cycle in epicycle, orb in orb :" — 

a system incapable of reduction to any form of geometrical 
analysis, and which, therefore, failed to afford the condi- 
tions of scientific progress, or to substantiate itself to the 
reason of men. It is because Numbers, and Form, and Motion 
in periodic times are the princvpia of the universe that the 
"Principia" of Newton can never perish from the memory 
of man. Whether regarded as a means of discipline or as 
an instrument of scientific research, the higher mathematics 
must ever assert their appointed place in any theory of edu- 
cation which proposes either to strengthen the reason of 
man or to explicate the phenomena of the universe. 

If it be, as I have argued, the function of a University 
not only to embody and perpetuate the existing store of 
human knowledge, bat also to consult for " the progi-ession 
of the Sciences," it necessarily follows that the sciences 
based on physical research must occupy a prominent place 
in any system of modern intellectual education. Considered 
apart from the modifying force of Christianity, our Modern 
Age differs from that of Greece and Rome mainly by virtue 
of those positive sciences which have shed such a surpassing 
lustre on every path of modern life and on every walk of 
modern art. And these sciences, more than any others, con- 
tain in themselves the conditions and the presage of a never- 
ending advancement. Here are the fountains of a knowl- 
edge which wells up from the very bosom of Nature. Here 



19 

are the nuliments o^ that '' potential physics" which enables 
the finite mind of man to re-think the thought of Grod in 
creation, as, step by step, we retrace the presence and work- 
ing of that Law whose "seat is in His bosom, and whose 
voice is the harmony of the World," The Dervise of Bal- 
sora, in the Arabian tale, gave to Baba Abdalla a precious 
ointment that opened the eyes on which it was laid to behold 
all the riches hidden in the earth ; but infinitely more 
precious is the eye-salve of Positive Science, which not only 
opens onr eyes to behold the riches of the earth, but purges 
our intellectual vision, that it may read the works of God 
by the light of reason, and no longer by the shadows they 
cast in passing before the senses of man. 

If it be a ground of just wonder that the devotees of clas- 
sical culture should have once denied to the physical sciences 
their legitimate place in any scheme of university education 
it remains none the less a duty to resist the pretensions of 
those who would assign to these sciences a to > exclusive posi- 
tion in the scholastic curriculum. Yet Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
in considt^ring the question, " What knowledge is of most 
worth?" has not scrupled to say that the study of science 
(meaning pliysical science) '^ is the best preparation for every 
order of human activity." 

Now, it cannot be doubted that an exclusive devotion to 
the physical sci-ences must wreak itself in a practical para- 
lysis or distorted growth of those faculties which, under 
•such a training, are left to pine without cultivation. We 
hold with Sir William Hamilton, that " a knowledge drawn 
too exclusively from without is not only imperfect in itself, 
but makes its votarie-s fatalists, materialists, pantheists : if 
they dare to think, it is the dogmatism of despair." And 
hence it is that the great founder of the so-called Positive 
Philosophy in France^ M. Oomte, has ventured to say that 



20 

in his eyes '' the heavens declare no other glory than that 
of Hipparchiis, of Kepler, of Newton, and of all the rest 
who have helped to establish the laAvs of celestial phenom- 
ena." Such was the blindness of this great thinker as he 
sat enthroned amid the blazing hierarchy of the sciences, 
while to the ears of even a heathen philosopher of the fourth 
century before Christ the planets rolled in their orbits with 
a rhythmic music which attested the master hand of the 
Divine Harmonist who first set the notes of their grand di- 
apason ; for the eyes of Plato were opened to see that the 
starry heavens, resplendent as they are with a beauty that 
surpasses " the beauty of figures wrought by the hand of 
Daedalus," were set before the mind of man to serve as " the 
patterns of knowledge," and not to feed the vanity of star- 
eyed Science. 

It is in view of the extravagances which result from the 
perversion of the physical sciences when thus misdirected in 
their aims, and exaggerated in the aspirations of their vo- 
taries, that we may next propound another kind of studies 
which constitute a necessary part of intellectual education/ 
as they also furnish a corrective to the aberrations of a phi- 
losophy which moves exclusively in matter and in the phe- 
nomena of necessary law. I allude to speculative philosophy, 
as well in its ontological as in its psychological departments 
— a study which, at its very outset, as a modern writer has 
remarked, calls up the great questions that pertain to the 
foundations of our knowledge, with the possibility of abso- 
lute truth, the limits of the human intellect, the reality and 
the nature of the distinction between object and subject ; 
that is, the relation between the macrocosm without us and 
the microcosm within us ; and, at a higher point of inquiry, 
the relations of the Finite to the Infinite, of the mind of 
man to the mind of God. These tremendous questions will 



21 

not down at onr bidding. They have haunted the minds of 
thinking men in all ages, and perpetually allure, as they 
perpetually baffle, the human understanding. No man can 
be called educated who remains ignorant of the attempts thai 
have been made by the great philosophers of different ages 
from the dawn of speculation in Greece down to the present 
day, to furnish a solution, more or less satisfying, of these 
grand problems of human being and destiny. And this we 
must say, while freely admitting, with one who was thepro-^ 
foundest critic of all existing systems in philosophy, as he 
was also the profoundest speculative thinker of modern times, 
that '^ the pa,st history of philosophy has been in a great 
measure a history only of variation and error." *'If," as 
he argues, ''it be right to philosophize, we must philoso- 
phize to realize the right; if to philosophize be wrong, we 
must philosophize to manifest the wrong ; on either alterna- 
tive, philosophize we must." The study of metaphysics 
cannot be sundered from the rational study even of physics. 
As Goethe tersely sings : 

Wilist du ias Unendliche schreiten ? 
Geii nur im Eudlichen nach alien Seiten. 

As in the farthest stretches of our vision the horizon of 
earth blends with and is lost in the ethereal blue of the sky, 
so our ultimate speculations on the smallest atom of matter 
or the vastest sphere in the stellar universe lead from the 
earthly horizon of the physical to the heavenly horizon of 
the metaphysical — from the realm of the Finite to the 
realm of the Infinite in Cause and Space and Time. 

Nor is this study unpractical or alien to human history. 
The speculations of Plato enter as really into the intellec- 
tual and moral education of the human race as the poems 
of Homer or the books of Euclid or the Institutes of Justin- 



22 

ian. It was the speculative philasophers of Greece who 
exahed the language of G-reece to be the vehicle of diose 
great ethical truths which were deposited in the Hebrew 
mind by a long line of splendid miracles, and by the cum- 
brous media of types and shadows addressed to an unspir- 
itual generation. It was because the philosophers of Greece 
had unconsciously filled an important place in the Provi- 
dential education of our race, that Paul, the great Apostle 
of the Gentiles, could stand on Mars' Hill and preach to the 
Athenians, im their own native languaoje, the wonderful 
works of God — a proclamation which, on the day of Pente- 
cost, required for its full utterance the miraculous tongues 
of flame. It was thus that St. Augustine, the great 
expounder of dogmatic Chrijtianity in his day, delighted 
to confess in Plato a teacher second only to the Teacher of 
Galilee, and it is thus that the philosophy of Aristotle has 
organized the thcaght of men for twenty centuries, and 
under two dispensations — the heathen and the Christian ; 
for it was not till Bacon had written his Novum Organum 
that the sceptre was wrested from the hands of this intel- 
lectual monarch among the sons of men. At more than one 
period the Christian Schools, as Jeremy Taylor expresses 
it, " have drawn some of their articles through the limbecs 
of Plato's philosophy," while the colossal figure of the great 
Stagirite casts such a mighty shadow across the ages that, 
on historic grounds, if no other, we must study the nature 
and the bearings of Grecian speculation. And the later 
phases of modern inquiry, under this head, whether in 
France, or Germany, or Great Britain, or in our own coun- 
try, must equally engage our attention if we are to scale 
the empyreal altitudes of thought, where "Alps on Alps 
arise." 

If in Language and Literature, in Mathematics, in the 



23 

Physical Sciences, and in Speculative Philosophy, we find 
the great fundamental elements of intellectual education, it 
is easy to p :rceive, as no less the law of necessity than of na- 
ture, that this education must proceed from the simple to 
the complex, from the concrete to the abstract, from the em- 
pirical to the rational. I do not fear that the art of educa- 
tion will ever be so far divorced from the science of educa- 
tion as to leave much room for error in fixing the order and 
succession of the studies that look to the equable and symmet- 
rical development of the mental powers. If, as Horace says, 
we cannot drive out nature with a fork, neither can we prick 
on nature by a fork into premature intellectual activity with- 
out soon discovering the source of our error by the mischiefs 
to which it leads. 

I cannot concur, therefore, wdth Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
when, as an inference from the manifold ways in which our 
mental powers may be excited and cultivated, he concludes 
that our most advanced modes of teaching " are not right 
ones or nearly the right ones." This is the very " dogma- 
tism of decpair," and not an inference justified by either the 
history or philosophy of education. And he seems to have 
sufficiently answered himself on this point, when, in another 
place, he propounds the doctrine that " the education of the 
child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the 
education of mankind, considered historically ; or, in other 
words, that the genesis of knowledge in the individual must 
follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the 
race." If, therefore, we would know the logical order of 
studies in any given curriculum, we have but to learn their 
chronological order in the evolution and development of 
human knowledge. History is here our teacher — teaching 
us what to learn and hoio to learn if we would stand on the 
shoulders of the generatio.is who have gone before us. 



24 

And hence it is easy to see that the number and quality 
and arrangement of studies in an university course are not 
arbitrarily fixed by educators, but are the outgrowth of 
man's intellectual tendencies in the past, and the highest 
expression of his intellectual wants in the present, as they 
are the indispensable conditions of future intellectual pro- 
gress. They are not arbitrary, because they follow and re- 
produce the chronological order of intellectual development 
in human history. And this is the order, by following 
w^hich the student lives into the life of humanity, and 
reaches out his hand to that ideal man in whom Pascal per- 
sonified the whole human race — "a man who never dies, 
and who learns perpetually." The golden lamp of history 
sheds its light along the track of the past ages that we 
may review the steps already trodden by the great intellect- 
ual masters of the race, and that we may resume in this 
generation the culture of all the generations that have yet 
appeared on the globe. Any general system of education 
which accomplishes less than this must lead to retrogression 
rather than to progress. 

And it is this order of studies which best lends itself to 
the purposes of professional culture and to proficiency in 
any branch of technology. He who has been thoroughly 
grounded in the elements of intellectual education is fitted 
to approach the study of Law, or Medicine, or Theology, as 
from a ^'coigne of vantage" which gives him an incalcula- 
ble superiority over one who is ignorant of the relation in 
which his profession stands to the affiliated branches of 
human learning and the existing intellectual status of hu- 
manity. True, we cannot expect, in the present stage of 
knowledges, to " drive all the sciences abreast," as Leibnitz 
was said to do in his day, but we can aspire to such an uni- 
versality of study as shall reveal to us the cross-lights by 



25 

whicli the sciences reciprocally illustrate each other, bound 
as they are to one another by a certain tie of relationship 
which makes them members of an inseparable sisterhood, 
like that of which Tasso spoke — 

Ch' in esser belle 

Mostran disparita ma somigliente. 

*' No perfect discovery can be made," says Bacon, '^ on a 
flat or a level ; neither is it possible to discover the more re- 
mote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon 
the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher 
science." And so, as he adds in another part of his treatise 
on the ''Advancement of Learning," " if any man think 
philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not 
consider that all professions are from thence served and sup- 
plied." And this he took to be the great cause that had 
hindered the progression of learning, "because the funda- 
mental knowledges have been studied but in passage." 

And it is in immediate connexion with this view of his 
that he deplored the segregation which resulted from the 
dedicating of foundations and dotations to single branches 
of " professory learning." The foundations of university 
education should be as broad as the realm of knowledge in 
the sciences and in the arts of civilized life. In laying these 
foundations, we must understand our epoch ; and in build- 
ing on them, we must look to the mark of owr high calling. 

The men who founded seats of learning in the past — the 
kings and queens and princes and prelates and statesmen, 
and the more than princely merchants who have thus im- 
mortalized their names — may be truly said to have '''builded 
wiser than they knew." Eton College, on the banks of the 
Thames, was founded by Henry VI, " to endure in all future 
time," as the residence of ''twenty-five poor scholars, who 



26 

were there to learn grammar, and also of twenty-five poor 
and infirm mer, whose duty it should be there continually 
to pray for the King's health and welfare so long as he 
lived, and for his soul after he had departed this life." But 
what a long line of illustrious men among the temporal and 
spiritual rulers of England — statesmen, warriors, divines^ 
scholars and poets — -has gone forth from those old monastic 
walls sin-e the year 1440, when they were first dedicated to 
" Blessid Marie of Etone beside Wyndsore." It is nearly 
fivj hundred years since tlie first serge-clad scholar was led 
to the feet of William of Wykeham at Winchester, and still 
with all the superadded lights of the nineteenth century — 

" His seven tj f.iithful bo3's, in these ])resumptuou3 days, 
Learn the old truth, speak the old words, tread in the ancient wajs ; 
Still fur their daily orisons resounds the matin chime; 
Still linked in holy brotherhood, St. Catherine's steep they climb; 
Still to their Sabbath worship they troop by VVykeham's tomb — 
Still in the sumnifr twilight sing their sweet song of Home."' 

How has the name of Oxford been transfigured from glory 
to glory as, ^aking its original title from the cattle who here 
were wont to ford the shallows of the Isis, it has since 
become the very Mecca of British scholarship, to which the 
tribes of English youth repair fi'om year to year ! How has 
Cambridge lengthened her cords and strengthened her stakes 
since the year 1110, when Master Gislebert, with three other 
monks, hired a barn on the banks of Cam, in which to give 
public* lectures ! "Thus from this small source," as the 
chronicle has it, " from this small source, which has swollen 
into a great river, we now behold the city of God made 
glad, and all England rendered fruitful by many teachers 
and doctors issuing from Cambridge, as from a most holy 
paradise." 

As there is no source of blessing so perennial as that of 



27 

tliose who open the well-heads of learning in a dry and 
thirsty land, so there is no foi'm of heaeficence wliich pre- 
serves and hallows the memory like that which ca'ls on the 
successive generations of men to rise up and bless the found- 
ers and benefactors of our Colleges and Universities. It is 
thus that at Oxford and at Cambridge a round of stated 
days is set apart for the solemn and grateful commemoration 
of all in their annals quorum henej\icta late patent, to quote the 
words of the Cambridge statutes under this head. By what 
else in his unfortunate hiStory is Henry VI so favorably 
known as by the foundation of that College whose antique 
towers are to-day his best monument, as they ^' crown the 
watery glades " near the Eoyal Castle of England? '' Na- 
tions, and thrones^ and reverend laws," says Sir Roundell 
Palmer, 



-Have melted like a dream^ 



Yet "W ykeham's works are green and fresh beside the crystal stream. 

In the light that streams through the stained-glass win- 
dows of his Colleges at Winchester f.nd at Oxford, towering 
monuments as they are to his large-hearted and clear- 
headed philanthropy, the world has actually forgotten that 
is was this same munificent prelate who rebuilt the Royal 
Castle of the British kings, erected the grand nave of A^in- 
chester Cathedral, repaired the highways of England^ 
spanned her rivers with bridges of solid masonry, recovered 
the Hospital of StJ Cross from the rapacity of its masters, 
paid the debts of insolvent prisoners, and maintained at his 
hospitable board a retinue of daily pensioners. 

How the name of Sir Thomas Gresham, that ''Flower 
of Merchants," as he was called in the days of Queen Eliza- 
beth, still smells sweet, and blossoms in the dust — leaving 
behind him^ in the College which first gave shelter to the 



28 

^' Royal Society" of Newton and his associates, a fragrance 
and splendor which surpass all the Flowers of Chivalry that 
bloomed in the wide tract of the Middle Ages. And hence 
it was that the lovers and friends of the saintly Kehle in 
England, after he had sung the " Christian Year," and 
been gathered to the seven-fold harpings of the Chantry in 
Heaven, could find no memorial so suited to keep his name 
forever green as that which they reared in the College but 
recently dedicated to his memory, and which they have 
placed in the galaxy of Oxford, where it shall forever shine 
like a star in the firmament. If what he loved to call '' the 
Oxford moral tone" shall ever die out at that University, we 
may be sure it will die out last of all in Keble College. 

That was a wise choice and a noble which the sturdy bur- 
ghers of Leyden made, when, after their dauntless struggle 
against the power of Spain, they were, as a reward for their 
valor, left to choose between the gift of a university and im- 
munity from taxation. They chose the former, and there- 
b}^ enriched not only themselves, but their posterity to the 
latest generation. And not their posterity alone, for it was 
a Professor of the University of Leyden, who, as editor of 
the Leyden Nouvelles Extraordinaires "^ in 1780, turned that 
influential organ of European public opinion in favor of 
American Independence at a time when John Adams, our 
Minister in Holland, could gratefully ap[)reciate the value 
of such a championship, audit was this same Professor who 
helped to mould the mind of John Quincy Adams, whose 
name we cannot mention to-night with other than the rev- 
erence due to one who filled the Curule Chair of the Repub- 
lic, and who was no less illustrious for his scholarship than 
for his public services. In this presence, I need but recall 

*■ A copy of this periodical for a series of years, embracing the term of John 
Adams's residence ia Holland, may be found in the Library of Congress. 



29 

the fact that this student of Leydeii University, after he be- 
came President of the United States, was among the most 
steadfast friends, and in the lioar of its greatest need, one 
of the m. st liberal benefactors of the Columbian College, to 
establish in his favor, and in favor of that University beyond 
the sea, an additional claim on our gratitude. 

History tells us how the star of Prussia paled before the 
meteoric genius of Napoleon, and a scholarly tradition also 
records that when, in 1807, she had gained a nominal peace, 
the King sent for Fichte, the celebrated Professor and spec- 
ulative philosopher, to consult with him as to the best means 
for restoring Prussian prestige and power. Fichte was true 
to his character as a philosopher and a professor. He ad- 
vised the King, if he wished to regenerate Prussia, to found 
a university which should make Berlin not only the political 
capital of his Kingdom, but the intellectual capital of Ger- 
many, and even of Europe. Such, it is said, were the origin 
and ujotive of the University of Berlin, and from this heart 
of Prussia, as from a deep and ever-gushing Geyser, what 
a copious stream of learning has flowed out not only to 
quicken that Kingdom, but to gladden the world 1 And to- 
day, if you would read the secret of Sadowa and of Sedan, 
you must search for it not in arsenals crammed with needle- 
guns, but in universities and in public schools, which make 
Prussia the most enlightened^ and therefore the most power- 
ful nation of Europe. 

Shall our College, with its fair beginnings, become a well- 
head of knowledge and of power throughout the land ? How 
has Harvard College, from its small beginnings, grown into 
a great University ? Let President Pel ton answer : "John 
Harvard's gift, and the contributions of successive friends 
of learning in the early times, followed by the HoUises, 
the Alfords, the McLeans, the Gores, the Eliots, the Phil- 



30 

lipses, tlie Lawrences, the Appletons, the Grays "—(time 
would fail to name all the "saints" of the Harvard calen- 
dar) — ''have made the institution what it is to-day" — the 
foremo'^t University in the land. Our College, from the 
mere felicity of its situation at this metropolitan centre, 
where society is hroad, liberal, and cultured, has many 
advantages. The learning of the present day, it is impor- 
tant to rema^-k. no longer courts the shades of the cloister, 
but walks abro.id along the highways of empire. Behold 
how, but a few weeks ago, the hand of Bismarck turned 
from protocols and papers of state to indite an autograph 
letter to a private citizen of Italy, the Count Trivulzio, 
begging, in behalf of Professor Mommsen, the loan of a few 
old Latin iascriptions which the Professor needed to clear 
up some disputed question in the Eoman history he is 
writing, not for Prussian scholars alone, but for the whole 
literary world. There is nothing esoteric in the learning 
of our day. And what advantages are ours, both for gain- 
ing and diffusing the blessings of highest culture ! For 
here, at our very doors, we have the Smithsonian Institu- 
tion, perpetually working, under the guidance of its illus- 
trious Secretary, on the boundaries of knowledge in all 
departments, thus literally fulfilling the will of its founder 
and exemplifying the highest function of a university, by 
increasing and diffusing knowledge among men. And 
here is the National Library of Congress, with its well-filled 
alcoves, open alike to teachers and scholars for purposes of 
literary or scientific research ; and here, for the study of 
Technology, are the accumulated fruits of American inven- 
tive genius stored in the Patent Office; and here, for the 
progressive scientific study of Astronomy, is the National 
Observatory; and here is that no less learned than useful 
school of practical geometers connected with the Coast 



31 

Survey; and here are the gardens winch, under the keep 
ing of the Agricultural Department, invite to the study of 
Botany, not in dry herbaria and in dryer tomes, hut amid 
flowery walks through which Shenstone would have loved 
to ramble by the side of Linnasus or Hasselquist. And 
here, for the student of Law, are the highest seats of our 
American Themis, as here, for the votaries of the healing 
art, are the priceless treasures of the Medical Museum, with- 
out any rival in the world among institutions of its kind ; 
and here, by the munificence of him who stands at tlie head 
of the governing Board of our College, is the Corcoran Gal- 
lery of the Fine Arts, to keep alive the love of beauty in the 
soul of man. 

' God grant that the day may not be far distant when our 
College, already a University in embryo, may be able, by 
the munificence of its endowments, and therefore by the 
range of its studies, to take advantage of all these singular 
opportunities for promoting true culture ir. all its depart- 
ments. '^ Learning," says a modern educator, "may be 
got from books, but not culture. This latter is a more liv- 
ing process, and requires that the student shall at times 
close his book, leave his solitary room, and mingle with his 
fellow-men." Where can he do this so well and so profit- 
ably as here, in this Capital of the Nation — here, where, as 
Bacon desiderated, we have " straitly conjoined" the con- 
ditions both of contemplation and action — "a conjunction 
like unto that of the two highest planets — Saturn, ihe [)lanet 
of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil 
society and action?" When our University, from these 
high places of the land shall send her quickening beams 
throughout the length and breadth of the nation, we shall 
have realized equally the prayers of its pious founders and 
the patriotic aspirations of Washington*'and Jefferson, of 



32 

Madison and Monroe, as of their illustrious compeers^^M^ 
not till then. As tliey labored and prayed for a National 
University at the seat of the National Government, so to 
this same end let us labor and pray in our generation, that 
we may build worthily and wisely and munificently on the 
foundations laid by the Fathers. And thus, perhaps, in 
this the fiftieth year of our academic history, the chime of 
the next Christmas bells shall sweetly blend with the trum- 
pets of our Jubilee. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 908 620 3 



i 



